How to survive in such a place? Ancient Pantellerians, over the millennia, devised an amazingly clever fog-catching garden design now known as the giardino Pantesco (“Pantellerian garden,” in Italian), each one for the sole purpose of nurturing a single sprout.

Giardini Panteschi are perfectly circular and are precisely calibrated to have walls of a specific height: tall enough to catch the fog and block the wind, but short enough to allow as much sun in as possible. Basketball-sized boulders are expertly stacked freehand—mortar is never used—into five-foot-thick walls that curve to encircle a 30-foot diameter enclosure with one small opening through which the gardener can crawl.